Copyright for students and researchers

The Copyright Act states that students are permitted to copy a reasonable portion of a literary, dramatic or musical work in both print and electronic form for the purpose of research or study. Reasonable portion is defined to be 10 per cent of the number of pages or one chapter if the work is divided into chapters.

In all other cases, the Copyright Act is silent on how much you can copy for their use to be ‘fair’. This means that no guidance is provided on how much of:

• a sound recording, film/moving image or broadcast can be used by a student or researcher under fair dealing for the purpose of research or study.
• any work can be copied under fair dealing for criticism or review, parody or satire or reporting of the news.

As a general rule, students and researchers should only copy what is necessary for the fair dealing purpose to ensure that their use is ‘fair’. In most cases, this will only be an extract of the work and not the whole work. For example, in preparing an essay, a student is likely to copy several pages from a book or an article from a journal. This is permitted provided the extracts copied are necessary for the student’s research or study. Further, if the student is making a parody of a song or film, it is unlikely that the student will need to copy the whole work for the fair dealing purpose. In such a case, copying an extract of the song or film as necessary will be ‘fair’.

In limited circumstances, you may be permitted to copy a whole work provided the whole work is necessary for the fair dealing purpose. For example, a researcher may need to copy an entire short poem when preparing a critique on the poem.

Overall, when relying on fair dealing, you must:

• use extracts and not whole works. In rare cases, a whole work can be copied provided it is necessary for the fair dealing purpose.
• always attribute the author and publisher where the source is known.

The relationship between copyright and plagiarism can be tricky to understand. Plagiarism is a type of misconduct that, in some cases, may also give rise to copyright infringement.

Plagiarism occurs where a student or researcher uses someone else’s ideas or words in their work and pretends they are their own. If a student or researcher has used a lot of someone else’s words without that person’s permission, copyright infringement may also occur.

All third party material used in your work should be labelled with the details of the copyright owner and author (if different to the copyright owner), the name of the work, where the material was copied from and when it was copied.

For example, using an Creative Commons licensed image from Flickr should be attributed in the following way “Hai Linh Truong, Sydney Harbour Bridge, August, 2014, available under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial ShareAlike 2.0 licence.”

You will need to seek permission from the copyright owner if you wish to use the work in a way which is not permitted by fair dealing.

Only a copyright owner can give permission, known as a licence, for others to copy, communicate (upload online or email) and/or perform their work.

Sometimes the copyright owner will ask for payment in exchange for giving permission. Other times, the copyright owner will give permission to use their work for free subject to certain conditions, such as with Creative Commons licences.

Link to material

Linking is not a copyright activity. This is because you are not actually ‘copying’ or ‘communicating’ any material, you are just providing a path to its location on another website.

Providing links to material on external websites will not infringe copyright and you do not need to seek permission from the website owner to include a link to their website.

Use embedded links

Embedding is another type of linking, except you don’t have to leave your website (eg blog or wiki) or intranet to access the content. It is commonly used for displaying online films, eg YouTube films, on websites.

Embedding involves copying the HTML code of the film, which is often displayed in a box near the film, and pasting it onto your website. The result of this is, rather than displaying the link, a small screen of the film will be shown on your website.

The primary advantage to embedding material is that you do not need to copy the material in order to make it available on your website. Some websites, such as YouTube, provide the link for embedding films. This makes embedding an easy and practical alternative to copying.

Create your own material

If you are using material that is your own original work and does not contain any material created by another person, you do not need to rely on the fair dealing exceptions as you are the copyright owner.

It is important that you label your original work with your name and the year it was created. This is so others know that the work is your original work and that you own copyright in that work.

Use Creative Commons material

Creative Commons is a set of licences which creators attach to their work. All Creative Commons licences allow the material to be used for free for educational purposes.

Using Creative Commons in your work can be a practical alternative to relying on the fair dealing exceptions. This is particularly because the fair dealing exceptions are complex, making it difficult for a student to:

• copy an entire work or large portions of a work
• modify and remix a work.

There are six standard Creative Commons licences. The table below lists these licences and the different conditions which attach to each.

While journal publishers usually ask authors to assign copyright to them, many now also allow self-archiving of final accepted manuscript version in an institutional repository. Other publishers may grant permission if a request is made to them. It will be useful for you to check the publisher’s policy on self-archiving before submitting your article for peer review. The knowledge could influence your decision about how to manage your copyright.

You may see the terms ‘preprint’, which refers to the version submitted by the author to the publisher, and ‘post-print’ which refers to the final accepted version.

The information may be on the journal’s website. Look for links called ‘Notes to contributors’ or ‘Information for authors’. The information could be in the publishing contract. Read it carefully before signing.

Here is an example of what to look for:

The Author(s) shall have the following rights
The right to post and update the Article on e-print servers as long as files prepared and/or formatted by APS or its vendors are not used for that purpose. Any such posting made or updated after acceptance of the Article for publication shall include a link to the online abstract in the APS journal or to the entry page of the journal.

Excerpt from the American Physical Society’s transfer of Copyright form.

RoMEO

The RoMEO web site provides a list of publisher policies.

Note that this information is not legally binding in Australia - your specific publisher agreement may be different.

If the publisher allows authors to retain the right to self-archive or if assignment of copyright is not required, there is no need to go on to the next step: you can immediately deposit a copy of your paper in Macquarie University ResearchOnline. If unsure, then contact the Macquarie University Lawyer or Macquarie University ResearchOnline staff for advice and assistance.

As part of the post-deposit checking process, Macquarie University ResearchOnline staff will check the copyright policy of the publisher and will write on your behalf to the publisher for permission if required, or if the policy is unclear.

To amend the publication agreement to deposit the final accepted manuscript version, if the publisher does not allow authors to self-archive, you could adopt one of the following strategies.

2a Best strategy: Amend the publishing agreement to reserve some rights

If the existing contract does not specifically grant authors the right to self-archive a copy of the final accepted manuscript version, it may be possible to cross out the relevant section of the existing agreement and insert a statement about the rights you wish to retain. For example:

The author transfers to [Publisher] the exclusive rights comprised in the copyright of the work, except that the author retains the following:

• The right to self-archive a copy of the work in the author’s institutional eprint repository.
• The right to make copies of all or part of the work for the author’s use in teaching.
• The right to use, after publication, all or part of this material in works by the author in print or electronic format.

Contact the publisher or journal editor to let them know what you are doing and why.

2b Alternative strategy: Retain your copyright and grant the publisher a “licence to publish”

You can choose to retain ownership of the copyright and grant the publisher an exclusive licence for the first formal publication of the work (in print, digital, or some other form).

Researchers who are employed by the US Government routinely use this strategy. They cannot assign copyright to publishers because the Government retains the copyright. It is worth noting that the publishers continue to publish articles authored by these researchers.

In addition to this you could grant the publisher a non-exclusive licence for at least the following purposes:

• Subsequent republication of the work
• Reproduction in course packs and in e-Reserve
• Reformatted publication (eg works transferred from print to microform and digital forms)
• Distribution through document delivery services
• Public performance and display of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, motion pictures, and other audiovisual works.

By granting non-exclusive rights to the publisher, the author retains the right to do any of these things without needing publisher permission.

Cross out and replace the original exclusive transfer language with text such as the following:

The author grants to the Publisher exclusive first publication rights in the Work, and further grants a non-exclusive licence for other uses of the Work for the duration of its copyright in all languages, throughout the world, in all media.

See in particular, the SPARC addendum.

Some publishers are very protective of what they perceive as their long term interests (including financial interests), and will not allow any flexibility or rights to authors seeking to use institutional repositories. Another alternative is to have deposit information only, or self-archive a copy of the submitted version

In this situation there are two main options:

• Macquarie University ResearchOnline may make metadata (information about the paper) available including information about the location of the published version, and archive but not make accessible, a copy of the final accepted manuscript version; or
• the author may self-archive the final submitted manuscript version before it is submitted to the publisher.

Before a paper is submitted to a journal for peer review, the copyright belongs to the author. Therefore, the author is always free to self-archive the final submitted manuscript version at this point in time. In fact, some researchers routinely self-archive their final submitted manuscript version. Physicists have been doing this for many years into their main discipline archive.

There are considerable variations in what publishers will allow authors to do in the time between submission and final publication. For more information about these possibilities, see the CreateChange website.